The Dog Ate My Girlfriend So I Made One Up

Anyone who suffered through our POTUS’ autobiography (now located in the fiction department of your local bookstore) and read about his New York girlfriend now knows that this was more of a composite creation, a merger of multiple women to create the woman in the pages. Now he did acknowledge that some people were composites and the reason he cites is their personal privacy. Indeed. .So private, they can’t be identified. He should give lessons to other agencies that thrive on secrecy. This is how you do it.

Given that she is a composite, one must ask, what is the author trying to say by using this tool? Via Politico:

“In Dreams from My Father, Obama chose to emphasize a racial chasm that unavoidably separated him from the woman he described as his New York girlfriend,” Maraniss writes, offering a passage from the book in which they go to see a play by a black playwright:

One night I took her to see a new play by a black playwright. It was a very angry play, but very funny. Typical black American humor. The audience was mostly black, and everybody was laughing and clapping and hollering like they were in church. After the play was over, my friend started talking about why black people were so angry all the time. I said it was a matter of remembering—nobody asks why Jews remember the Holocaust, I think I said—and she said that’s different, and I said it wasn’t, and she said that anger was just a dead end. We had a big fight, right in front of the theater. When we got back to the car she started crying. She couldn’t be black, she said. She would if she could, but she couldn’t. She could only be herself, and wasn’t that enough.

There is the authenticity of the nature of the arguement with this person. He asserts. She disagrees. He asserts more. End of arguement. Seems like the “I won” approach to things. But she’s also a device to allow him to posit that the anger and the remembering of that anger and note the curious lack of detail. We don’t know the playwrite or the play or the theatre so we can’t know how mainstream or radical this humor that he posits is typical, is. We’re left as always, to fill in the blanks and have to trust the narrator’s opinion and reporting of the things as they were. If this is composite, how are we to know that anything in this landscape is anything but sand, shadows of multiple experiences swirled together to create a POV that advances an agenda? We can’t.

One could ask, how many other fictional but based on real people and events moments are in his tedious self genuflecting tome but that would be fruitless since the press and those in a position to discover the man behind the curtain have shown themselves to suffer from an appauling lack of curiosity. It’s not likely to change much as we might hope.

So I suggest a new title for the book: Never let the truth ruin a good story.

The big question is why is the President admitting to this now? Is it because Jim Treacher and Weazel Zippers and even some at Politico amongst others, have actually read his book and now can begin the rebuttal of the 2008 campaign and its aftermath? (They’re looking for those pesky things called facts). Is this a preemptive attempt to dissarm any future “I ate dog” type scandals between now and the election that would tarnish the glowy Obama is like better than Superman-Jesus-Champaign-and-Caviar-Einstein+awesome awesomeness type image? I suspect not.

This is about elections. How to top the purple prose of the prior cammpaign and reenergize the Obama fainting zombies of the past?

Write and launch a new book…or have someone else do it, with things that weren’t in the first two…how to get people to read it? Admit that some of what was written wasn’t 100% factually are of accurate…not truthfully speaking accurate….and allow the lure of mystery, of getting the intimate details of the real person do the rest. They’ll buy it. And whatever you put in to explain why you didn’t tell the truth in the last two books, they’ll buy that too…because they want this Cool-ade President, who looks great on a cover of Teen Beat…I’m sorry, Newsweek.

Expect more attempts to create an aw shucks type humility it wasn’t all true but hey it’s all in good fun and aren’t I cool and wonderful narrative by the media through November. He will recraft himself and recast himself more times than Lady Gaga and Madonna combined (icky thought) and if he can’t, expect the lapdogs in the press to create in Romney or any other Republican or anyone who would vote Republican as the visual and mental image of evil incarnate worse than Satan times infinity with a dash of pure ignorance to add to the spite. Not only are they evil, they’re stupid and evil. You can’t let them win…

Not far from reality for possible Liberal bumper stickers:

Republicans….Romney….now with 20% more evil for 2012.

or Romney…Elected…the reason the Mayans were right.

Know that we will get hammered over and over again with a double dog dare to prove we’re not racist and that it wasn’t just trying to hang out with the cool kid and make history but that we really BELIEVED…and if we really BELIEVE….then we have to give him a second term. Clap your hands three times and say I do believe taxes promote and create jobs and growth. I do I do I do.

So be prepared.

It is inconceivable to these folks that there are people out there in this land who oppose them on principle and not out of hatred of “the other.” as has been floated in recent newscasts. It’s coming. We shall become a composite of all the left hates, rather than our own selves in the narrative.

Why?

It’s much easier to hate and love composites than real people who are often more than their political affiliation or orientation or racial or economic background. It’s much easier to target and destroy straw men and demagouge your opponents than to wrestle with real flesh and bone arguements and counter proposals. And if we’ve learned anything from our real flesh and bones President and his daydreamy virtual version of himself in print, it’s that whatever else this man is, there is a laziness about his intellect. He expects people to follow though he lead. He expects to win by simply asserting his opinion.